Overview

Analysing daily mixes and discover weekly playlists

As an active Spotify user I often contemplate about maintaining an enormous playlist of songs that I like. However, in my opinion, if you really like a song you’ll remember it, so there is no need for a playlist to remind you of what songs you like. That being said, I do need some type of playlist to get my day started. Therefore I listen to my daily mixes almost exclusively. Occasionally I listen to my discover weekly playlist that always surprises me with its quality of recommended songs. Somehow these playlists seem fresh every time while at the same time containing a lot of songs that I know and love.

This made me wonder how these playlists vary from day to day and week to week and how my discover weekly relates to my daily mixes.

Therefore I will be analyzing my daily mixes and discover weekly playlists for the duration of 8 weeks. The interest lies mostly on the relation between the daily mixes and the discover weekly playlist. There is two things I hope to discover:

  1. Is there a way to predict my discover weekly playlist of the next week based on my daily mixes of the current week.

  2. Is there a way to predict which daily mixes I listened to in the previous week(s) based on my discover weekly playlist.

My daily mixes usually range from playlists containing Pixies and the Velvet Underground to playlists containing Miles Davis and Charlie Parker to playlists containing Eagles of death metal and the Black keys to playlists containing Canned heat and Roy Buchannan. Sometimes my daily mixes vary a lot with regard to each other, causing my discover weekly playlist to be a total mess sometimes. This will be very interesting to analyze.

Analysis of the weekly playlists

Valence, energy, major/minor and tempo

In terms of energy/valence the two discover weeklies are distributed fairly similar. However Weekly 1 is more scattered whereas weekly 2 can be divided into two groups (seen in next plot). Loudness is pretty much the same among all songs. Both playlists consist of mostly major songs which, honestly, was to my surprise. Something interesting in weekly 2 is that the songs with highest valence and highest energy are songs in a minor key.

Change of energy in songs in the discover weekly playlists

Keys

Weekly 1 seems to be mostly in “A”. This makes sense because the songs in that playlist have a lot more simplicity to them. And A is a pretty “go to” key in my opinion.

Daily v Weekly

Column

Valence and Energy

Column

Some Explanation

Having some issues with Cairo and plotly, Will fix and then this will look Beautiful

Chroma Features

Chromagraphs for two versions of Paranoid android

Radiohead

Same song. Drastically differently performed. You can see that both versions have a similar structure regarding the chord changes but the changes are at different moments. Also Brad Mehldau really emphasizes one chord whereas the Radiohead version has the chroma magnitude more spread out at each time. A reason for this is probably that the Brad Mehldau version is mostly piano. Also note that the original (Radiohead) version ends the song mostly in A with some magnitude in D E and F as well. Brad Mehldau takes this and turns it around, putting a lot of the energy in D E and F and less in A.

Brad Mehldau

Trying to find a dynamic warp path for these two versions is quite hard

Due to the completely different timings in the song and generally different approach to the song, they are completely different songs according to Dynamic Time Warping. Let’s take a look at another example.

DTW path is even less observable now

Even though when you listen to both songs you can immediately link them (probably due to the lyrics), they are nothing alike due to DTW.

Still, when I listen to these two covers I feel that they are more similar than the two “Paranoid Android” versions which does contain some clearer warping paths (upper right area)

(Side note if you don’t know the Roy Buchanan version and you like the Jimi Hendrix version really give Roy’s version a listen)

Twelve bar blues

Crossroads by Cream

I can’t quit you baby by Led Zeppelin

DTW

I’m pretty sure there is a example that shows two 12 bar blues tracks with a really visible dtw line. But I haven’t found the example yet.

Concluding thoughts

Covers don’t have to sound like eachother. (Will expand in the future)